Although there are only two courses within the Harvard art history curriculum that concentrate on the materials and techniques of art, the latter are explored on a regular basis by the large number of classes scheduled from Boston area art schools. At the heart of many of these classes is a careful consideration of the history and nature of paper. While the Fogg’s paper lab has a collection of historic paper moulds, as well as pulp paper samples that are used in the teaching of the technicalities of papermaking and watermarks, works from the print and drawing collections can be used to stress how paper is far more than a simple surface to draw upon. Paper is an integral element of any work, imparting its subtleties and qualities of color, texture, and tone, and often asserting a commanding presence alongside the actual image. A juxtaposition, for example, between a drawing by Jean-Baptiste Greuze on a tonally warm, richly textured, cream paper with that of a work by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo on a characteristically dazzling and naturally luminous white paper, underlines the significant differences in visual effects that papers of different hue and texture can produce. Equally, a discussion of how a support with a middle tone is advantageous to Teaching with Paper: The Fogg Art Museum Alan Shields, Dove of Piece, 1975, 27.7 x 30.7 cm (11 x 12 inches), dyed handmade paper, watercolor and thread collage. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Michael K. Torf, 1980.22. All works are in the collection of the Fogg Art Museum. All photos by Katya Kallsen and courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, unless otherwise noted.  35 artists with a more painterly approach to the modeling and definition of form can be made real through the example of drawings on sixteenth-century Venetian or seventeenth-century Dutch blue papers. And what better instance than the prints of James Abbott McNeill Whistler to emphasize the care, even obsession, that many artists take in choosing what paper to work on or with?1 Given the great significance of the Museum’s teaching mission, the didactic role that a potential gift or purchase might have in the classroom is given high priority in the acquisition process. In recent years, a number of those acquisitions in both the print and drawing departments have added to important examples of paper pulp art already in the collection, including some superb examples of Alan Shields’s paper works and the loan of a fine group of Douglass Morse Howell’s “papetries.” To choose just a handful of those recent acquisitions for discussion is difficult, and brevity forces the mention only in passing of other works that have proved themselves essential in teaching – Jonathan Seliger’s paper pulp replica of a lemon pie, Fresh (2001), or Mel Bochner’s cast paper pulp piece Language Is Not Transparent (1999), for example. However, the four that I have selected to write about in greater detail are not just personal favorites but never fail to provoke discussion and debate within the study room about the nature and potential of paper art today. Perhaps the most extraordinary and provocative pulp piece that has come to the Fogg in recent years is one of John Cage’s Wild Edible Drawings. In order to explore the possibilities of paper that could be recycled as food, in the spring of 1989, Cage produced, in partnership with Bernard Toale and Joe Zina of Rugg Road Papers in Somerville, Massachusetts, a suite of Edible Drawings based on his macrobiotic diet. A little over a year later, in August 1990, the three, together with artist and plant specialist Beverly Plummer, whom Cage had consulted on the earlier Edible Drawings project, spent six days collecting plants from the fields and forests next to Plummer’s studio in North Carolina. Twenty-seven plants, including milkweed, cattail, hijiki, and kudzu, were used to make twelve different papers in an edition of six and, as with the Edible Drawings, the plants were grouped into recipes by using the I Ching, the Chinese book of divination which was pivotal to the chance operations of much of Cage’s work. What, however, sets the Fogg’s drawing apart from the few Wild Edible Drawings that still survive, is that part of the work, as Cage had once envisioned, was eaten – served as part of a sauce to over 200 dinner guests. The work in question had at one time been in the possession of Michael Silver (1947–2003), an artist in his own right and chef at the café at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Silver, whose work was greatly influenced by Cage, was intent on cooking with one of the three Wild Edible Drawings that he owned personally, and he corresponded with Cage about such a possibility; a project realized in 1995, three years after Cage’s death. On the last day of his employment at the museum, Silver, in his own words, took one of the drawings and “cooked it and served it to over two hundred people. I made a wild rice and mushroom soubise to approximate its original flavor and ground up two-thirds of the drawing to use as one would a spice. I wanted to make sure everyone ate some of it. I served it with sweet potatoes.”2 Fascinated by the transformative power of art and the process of, in his words, “transposing one work of art into another,” Silver appropriated the remaining part of the drawing into one of his own works, mounting on either side of the drawing a knife and fork. The work as it now exists – mostly eaten and morphed into something quite remote from its original Jonathan Seliger, Fresh, 2001, box: 5 . x 4 . x 1 - inches, cotton paper, silkscreen, mylar; pie: 4-inch diameter x1 inch, cotton, pigment; pie tin: linen with aluminum powder. Photo: D. James Dee. Courtesy of Dieu Donné Papermill, New York. Michael Silver, John Cage’s “Edible Drawing” cooked and eaten – August 31, 1995 in the Gardner Museum’s café, 1995, 45.5 x 38 cm (18 x 15 inches), mixed media mounted on paper. Gift from the Collection of Richard S. Sullivan and Melody Bostick Sullivan, 1999.281.1.36 context – never fails to provoke earnest discussion among students about artistic appropriation and edible art. The tremendous potential of paper pulp is often underlined to classes by showing Emiko Kasahara’s Untitled (memo pad). Much of Kasahara’s photographic and installation work has taken the status of women in the patriarchal society of her native Japan as its subject. Focused on issues of femininity and feminism, a common element to a number of her pieces is the use of female hair. “Hair is a symbol of beauty on the human body,” Kasahara has noted. “Hair represents vitality of life and sexualities and is precious. But when you cut off the edge and let it fall on the floor, it’s considered disgusting dirt. It’s the same hair, but it’s interesting that it shows both beauty and dirt.”3 Made at Dieu Donné Papermill, Untitled (memo pad) consists of 25 handmade sheets of paper that appear like a normal mass-produced ruled journal pad. However, the ruled lines are made not by printing black and red lines but from human hair – black for the horizontal lines and red for the vertical margins. In an astonishingly obsessive and careful process, each strand of hair was laid on top of a cotton base sheet before a thin, translucent layer of linen paper was placed on top .In a fabulous conceit, here paper literally imitates paper. Among the subtlest and most suggestive contemporary drawings in the drawing collection are three works by the sculptor Joel Fisher. From the very start of his papermaking in 1969, Fisher noticed how the felts used to press the paper would create minute imperfections on the paper’s surface by leaving residues of tiny fibers. Made on small sheets of highly textured handmade paper, each linear drawing – one to a sheet, delicate and slight in outline – references in magnified form one of those visible fibers embedded within the surface of the paper. Although the configuration of the fibers are accidental and beyond his control, Fisher selects the shape of one of the fibers to act as the matrix or template for subsequent work; usually a drawing on the same sheet that mirrors in larger-scale the form of the fiber is followed by a further translation into three dimensions. As Fisher has written:“ I am committed to this sequence of fiber to drawing to sculpture only to the extent that it allows me an incredibly inventive source to work from. The forms come to me as neutral, and then gain significance as I work on them. They absorb a lot.” He continues, “The drawings allow me a real sense of abundance, because the forms are more inventive than anything I could come up with. I like them a lot because they don’t come from me. And they’re a source I’m quite comfortable with – as some people might use their dreams as a way to start out.”4Although Cage, Kasahara, and Fisher were all intimately involved in the actual manufacture of their papers, Jill Baroff creates works of marked visual complexity through the layering of almost transparent sheets of honey-colored gampi paper. The Fogg owns three works by the artist, two of which are related to “Four Corners,” a 1992 installation in which she made cross-shaped incisions into the sheetrock walls of her studio. The drawings, both titled Study, are each composed of four small sheets of beautifully textured gampi. The paper is layered such that each sheet forms one quadrant of a square. As each sheet overlaps the edge of its neighbor, and all four meet at a central juncture, the increased opacity of the layered paper along those edges delineates the form of a soft-edged cross that stretches from one side of the work to the other. Issues of structure, space, and surface are heightened by Baroff’s placement of one delicate and subtle dot of watercolor wash on each of the sheets. Depending upon the number of Emiko Kasahara, Untitled (memo pad), 1998, 8 - x 5 - x. inches, human hair between linen and cotton paper, glue-bound to handmade cardboard backing. Photo: D. James Dee. Courtesy of Dieu Donné Papermill, New York. Joel Fisher, Untitled Apograph, 1982, 14.5 x 14.4 cm (5 : x5 inches), graphite, conté crayon, and found fiber on handmade paper. Margaret Fisher Fund, 1994.114. 37 layers of gampi that the dot lies under, the paper itself simultaneously conceals and reveals the watercolor below – nuanced and diffuse under multiple layers; clearly articulated and defined when exposed on the topmost sheet. Using the simplest of means, Baroff sensitively explores the effects of luminosity and the realm between two and almost three dimensions in which the ground, medium, support, and figure are conflated as one. Like all the works discussed, Baroff’s work has become invaluable in the teaching of how paper has in recent decades transformed itself from a relatively passive and recipient support to an active medium in and of itself. Jill Baroff, Study, 1993, 19 x 18.7 cm (7 - x 7 inches), watercolor on Japanese gampi paper. Purchase through the generosity of Sarah-Annand Werner H. Kramarsky, 1993.223._____________notes 1. The Fogg owns a number of impressions by Whistler on the antique European papers that he sought for their warm tone. See Jennifer Cabral, The Gentle Art of Making Prints: Whistler Impressions from the Fogg Art Museum, exhibition catalog, Newcomb Art Gallery, Tulane University, December 5, 2002–February23, 2003, n.p.2. Letter from Michael Silver to William W. Robinson, Maida and George Abrams Curator of Drawings, Fogg Art Museum, March 10, 1999.3. Lenny Ann Low, “Hair Days, Good and Bad,” The Sydney Morning Herald, June 1, 2004.4. Joel Fisher quoted in Wade Saunders, “Talking Objects: Interviews with Ten Younger Sculptors,” Art in America vol. 73 (November 1985): p. 119.